Wednesday, 24 August 2011

Nicollet Project

By Charles Umbanhowar

What would it be like to wander North America before (or shortly after) the arrival of European explorers and settlers? What did the landscape look like? Who were the people already living here and how did they interact with their world? These questions have occupied the time of a variety of thinkers and writers ranging from Aldo Leopold to more recently Charles Mann in his book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. And yet other writers have wondered about our wonderings about past landscapes.

Imagining past landscapes is especially difficult in the Upper Midwest where plow agriculture dominates. The remnants of past landscapes are small and have been heavily changed over the past 150 years, and a landscape without roads and farms built on the grid of the Public Land Survey seems unimaginable. The 1836-1839 expedition notebooks of Joseph. N. Nicollet give us glimpse of the unimaginable, and perhaps this is why Nicollet and his work have been a subject of fervent interest over the past 100 years.

Nicollet was a French scientist, formally trained as an astronomer, and he travelled extensively in the Midwest as he worked to collect the data need for his Hydrographical Map (Figure 1). His story has been wonderfully recounted by Martha Bray in her book The Journals of Joseph N. Nicollet. Bray and her husband also published several collections of excerpts from the Nicollet which have probably done more than anything else to maintain and generate interest in the expeditions and the landscape of Minnesota and the Dakotas. It was these excerpts that got me interested in Nicollet more than 25 years ago while still a student.

Because excerpts are excerpts and cannot give a full sense of a work, I, two colleagues, and many students at St. Olaf (with funding from NCUR and the Lancy Foundation) have been working to make available the complete field notebooks and maps and other records generated by the Nicollet expeditions, with particular focus on the years 1838 and 1839 when Nicollet travelled through the prairies of southern Minnesota and the eastern Dakotas (Figure 2, Figure 3). The materials we worked with are archived in Washington DC at a variety of locations. The 1838 journal of Nicollet and many of his map, astronomical journals , and even a mail pouch are housed at the Library of Congress in the Manuscripts Division. Notebooks for the 1839 expedition up the Missouri River and on to Devil’s Lake, North Dakota are at the National Archives. And finally, an 1838 Field Botanical Notebook by the expedition’s botanist Charles Geyer is housed in the Smithsonian’s archives.

Scanned images of all these are posted on a Nicollet Web Site that we created for these materials. We felt quite privileged to be able to work with these materials. One of the things that gave us a real sense of the writers and their work were – as silly as it seems – the imperfections such as stains and ink spots and tears. We have used a compression program called Zoomify to allow the reader to greatly magnify most of the material at the web site for this reason. Nicollet’s notebooks are full of sketches and observations of temperatures and sky conditions most of which were not/could not be included in the published excerpts. And it was these sketches that allowed us to relocate a number of the places visited by the expedition, for example the “pretty little hills” just west of the Makato (Blue Earth) river in southern Minnesota (Figure 4).

Absent also from the published excerpts were extensive descriptions of plants and their habitats that Geyer recorded. It was reading these notes that gave us a better understanding of how important Geyer’s observations (written in English) were to our understanding of the landscape, and it was in part these notes that led us to begin to search the Smithsonian National Herbarium for specimens collected by Geyer (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Excerpt from Charles Geyer 1838 Botanical Notebook.

Figure 6. Asclepias viridiflora, an example of a plant specimen collected by Charles Geyer. Now a part of the collection at Smithsonian National Herbarium, barcode: 00945841

To our pleasant surprise we found many specimens and this was repeated as we searched through the herbaria of the Philadelphia Academy of Science, New York Botanical Garden and Missouri Botanical Garden. To date we’ve located over 450 specimens and images of many of these specimens are now posted at the web site we have created or available on-line at the aforementioned herbaria. Unfortunately most of the 1838 specimens that Geyer notes in his field notebook were lost in transit from St. Paul to St. Louis, and while the 1839 specimens are wonderful they are not accompanied by a corresponding field notebook. The location of the 1839 field notebook is a mystery. It is likely gone forever, perhaps, if it even survived that long, being destroyed in the firebombing of Dresden since Geyer returned to Germany to live near Dresden and was associated with the herbarium there. If ever relocated this journal would be of tremendous scientific value. We can only hope.

We continue to work with the field notebooks and other materials. For example, a student and I will soon embark on a project to transcribe daily weather data collected by Nicollet that we hope to be able to add to a larger effort to rescue historical weather data. We hope someday to be able to return to Washington to continue scanning materials.

Hi, I am interested in your project, especially making JNN notebooks and sketch maps available on line. BTW, I got the LOC to scan the 1843 map and then put it on Wikipedia. If there is a way to help with the weather diary I would like to do that (I am a meteorologist with the NWS at Grand Forks, ND.). Anyway, I find JNN very inspirational and would like to help tell his story to the rest of the world.

The Field Book Project is an initiative to increase accessibility to field book content that documents natural history. Through ongoing partnerships within and beyond the Smithsonian Institution, the Project is making field books easier to find and available in a digital format for current research, as well as inspiring new ways of utilizing these rich information resources.